Politics, Society, and Race Relations: Their Impact on Desegregation of Public Higher Education in Georgia

• In Event: Roundtable Session 40
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Intellectual Change, and Progressivism

Abstract

The study investigates the historical and contemporary social and political contexts for race relations in Georgia and the effects of those contexts on desegregation efforts in public universities within the state including legal challenges to the status quo in higher education. Applying primary sources such as first hand newspaper accounts by reporters, oral histories, diaries, memoirs, legal records, court testimony, and court filings as well as secondary sources authored by historians, political scientists, and legal scholars the goal of the study is to determine whether meaningful desegregation in Black and White institutions can be achieved and what legal precedential standards should guide those efforts—the U.S. Supreme Court’s standard in Bazemore, in Green, or some other standard.

Author

• Thomas G. Barrett, University of Arkansas at Little Rock